Happy New Year … just 14 days after the fact.

Some quick updates:

* I went back to my old site, Male Pattern Fitness, with a guest article. In it, I review my favorite new workout books of the past 12 months, including Adam Campbell’s outstanding Big Book of Exercises.

* I did a really, really fun podcast with Mike Robertson. The goal was to talk about how fitness professionals can improve their writing to move their careers forward, but the most memorable stretch comes when I go off on a spontaneous rant about how annoyed I am by Facebook. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, so I guess it was going to come out sooner or later. Still, it caught both of us by surprise. I just hope it’s as entertaining to you as it was to me when I was getting…

Tags: Tags: books, dad fitness, journalism, mens health, mike robertson, podcast, writing

I don’t always answer my email promptly, a character flaw that I’d like to correct but probably won’t anytime soon. However, I did answer a couple of random questions sent by readers this weekend, and thought I’d share the answers here. If this is something you’d like to see here, I’ll do it more often.

And if you disagree with my replies to those readers, please let me know where I’m wrong and how I should’ve answered. With both questions, I’ve done some slight editing for the usual reasons (grammar, punctuation, clarity) and to protect the correspondent’s anonymity.

I’m a newbie personal trainer working in a local gym. Whenever I try to talk to my fellow trainers about functional training and training the body as a unit vs. body-parts style, they think I’m stupid and new and just don’t get it.

I’m intimidated to train my clients in…

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Tags: Tags: careers, email, fitness, journalism, magazines, Media, personal training

I’ve been resisting the temptation to write about Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers for the past several weeks. But every time I sit down to work on something else, my mind goes back to that book. More specifically, I start thinking about the book’s second chapter, “The 10,000 Hour Rule.” Even more specifically, I come back to the idea that not all hours are created equal.

The book, as you know, is the nation’s #1 nonfiction bestseller at this moment. I think everyone I work with in the fitness business has read it. TC, editor in chief at Testosterone Muscle, wrote about it in his Atomic Dog column more than a month ago. Chad Waterbury recommended it to me even before that, and finally sent me a copy as an early birthday present when I mentioned in early January that I still hadn’t gotten…

Tags: Tags: books, journalism, Media, outliers, publishing, writing